OK, it was yesterday. If you care consider yourself the recipient of a belated “Happy Hitler’s Birthday!” card.

There are all kinds of things I could write about, but don’t. The volume of things is overwhelming, and I have other things to do, including nothing some of the time. I’m not a scholar and if I was I would read and research primary sources, but I usually just shoot from the hip on stuff I come across in my intellectual wanderings. Take anything I say in that vein.

The subject of Holocaust revisionism came up on one of my RSS feed. Some opponents of the system want to claim the Nazi effort to kill large numbers of people, particularly Jews, did not happen or is exaggerated. They correctly believe that Holocaust propaganda is used as a cudgel against people Jews don’t like, or who may not be sufficiently enthusiastic about Puritan globalism, and incorrectly believe the way to respond to this is to say it didn’t happen.

I believe that the Holocaust, or “Shoah” as the Jews like to call it, did happen pretty much as we are told. I don’t think it discredits nationalists because it was an event that happened in a greater context which is poorly understood.

The first and best known context of Nazism is Bolshevism, or the nihilistic, terrorist form of communist revolution that started in Russia. Jews didn’t invent it; Nechayev was not a Jew. Nonetheless Jews saw it as an opportunity to improve their position, and became a crucial part of it, especially in the secret police. Outside of Russia they were the foremost activists for this revolution. Communists led by Russian Jew Eugen Leviné murdered Bavarian noblemen in the aftermath of World War I. Janusz Bardach was a Jewish student in Poland on the eve of World War II. In his autobiography “Man Is Wolf to Man“, he describes how he and all his secular Jewish friends supported communism and welcomed the Russian invasion. (He mentions that his girlfriend and her family were orthodox and did not.) He even helped a drunken, nasty NKVD officer help round up people.

The greater, and more important context of German nationalism and thus Nazism was English manipulation of European, or continental politics. The English goal was to ensure no European nation could gain primary power over the whole continent, and thus become a threat to English global power. The worst threat to England since the Spanish Armada was the French Revolution and then Napoleon. England ultimately won the Napoleonic Wars but did not want such a situation ever to happen again. Whatever other alliances they might make, Russia was a key piece in maintaining European disunity. A huge country on the eastern edge of Europe, Russia couldn’t dominate Europe itself, but could prevent any other country from doing so.

And this is what I think Moldbug, Foseti and others don’t understand. The Puritans were not allied with Russia because they were communists, they were allied with Russia because it was their spoiler in Europe. The political structure of Russia wasn’t important, its geography was. This alliance didn’t apply always and everywhere- England fought Russia in the Crimea and played the “Great Game” against it in Asia- but for European matters it was critical.

After the defeat of Napoleon, the reunification of Germany in 1870 provided the next great challenge to English hegemony. England allied with France, Russia and others to surround Germany and neutralize it. Unfortunately this network of alliances did not prevent war, but eventually triggered it. The old chauvinist Anglophone explanation of World War I was “the Germans started it.” The more recent, nuanced one is “it was a failure of diplomacy.” But English desire to contain Germany has to be seen as a primary cause, possibly the primary cause.

The disaster of World War I destroyed much of England’s young male population and wide swaths of France. Germany was left in chaos. Punitive reparations destroyed the economy and created hyperinflation. Many Germans felt, not unjustifiably, that their nation had been unfairly victimized and should rise again to assert itself.

In this atmosphere was born the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, or by its German initials the NSDAP. This political organization must be taken separately from German nationalism, German militarism, the pagan and romantic creed of Nazism, and the modern boogeyman of “Nazism”, which is any kind of assertion of ethnic self-interest or nationalism by non-Jews, all of which are different in small but important ways. What is most important here is Nazism, not a philosophy, not a set of economic and political policies, not a religion, not just a thought crime as currently understood by the system, but a combination of all these things.

Nazism was fundamentally an expression of German Romanticism, just as communism is. It was the belief that man, when he seeks not merely the good but the great, the ideal, becomes a kind of god and hero and labors under no kind of what is ordinarily understood as moral limitations imposed by society, religion, civilization, or custom. Nothing that would be considered a crime or sin to the ordinary man is forbidden him, including killing on whatever scale. He may commit errors, but because he strives for the ideal these errors are not only not held against him, they are positive proof he is a superman above all others. In the context of Nazism these attitudes are considered horrifying and repellent, but in the context of communism they are held firmly by a great many people.

The superman to Nazis was not an individual, but the Aryan people or in practical specifics, the German people in Europe, whatever political jurisdiction they lived under, and they annexed German areas of other countries before the war.

Nazism was hostile, in rough order, to Jews, Slavs, the British Empire, and any Europeans who opposed German hegemony. Jews, as communist activists and potentially terrorists, were an immediate internal threat. Nazis didn’t make the distinction between German Jews, who were fairly assimilated and probably loyal to Germany, and Eastern European Jews, who were quite hostile. In the atmosphere of the times fine distinctions weren’t made by anyone. Russia and the Slavs were adjacent, communist and expansionist. Beyond the political and military situation the Nazis simply regarded the Slavs as inferior, and Germanic peoples had dominated or preyed on them from the time of the Varangians to the Teutonic Order. The British Empire, which should probably include the US for practical purposes, had been containing or fighting Germany since its modern inception. Other Europeans had to submit to Germany or be conquered.

Nazism adopted things like nature worship, the love of being out in nature and hiking and camping in the woods and mountains, and health food, that we now associate with “hippies” but are part of pagan German romanticism. It was not originally hostile to homosexuality, although after the Night of the Long Knives it reined in the more freewheeling and non-bourgeouis aspects of army and vagabond life found in the SA.

Nazism was eugenic, and believed not only in the elimination of entire populations that it regarded as hostile, such as Jews and Gypsies, but mentally retarded and physically handicapped Germans. The application of eugenics to Germans was hardly a pagan Teutonic idea. To quote the Havamal- “The lame can ride horse, the handless drive cattle,
the deaf one can fight and prevail, ’tis happier for the blind than for him on the bale-fire,
but no man hath care for a corpse.” In other words, to the Germanic pagans a handicap was a burden in a world of burdens, but something to be coped with, not despaired of. It was better than being dead. The god Hoder was blind, the od Tyr missing a hand. In a brutal world of war and hard labor, permanent injuries were part of life, and handicapped relatives were cared for. The idea of eliminating the feeble could only have come from Puritan progressivism, which was highly eugenic.

Nazism was simply a product of a certain time, place and culture. Was it the unique and ultimate evil of human existence? I will blaspheme here by saying no. It was one of a long line of human evils and tragedies that will afflict us until the end of time. Specifically it was a reaction to the evil of Russian communism, and more generally a reaction to Puritan globalism.

Hitler and the Nazis, with the support of most of the German population, sought to take on and defeat Russian communism, break the English checkmate on European power and make Germany the master of Europe. They got the living crap beaten out of them. Nazism and German militarism were ended forever and Germany was finished as a political and social force outside its own borders. As a cultural force, Germany is a powerful and ever-present ghost through German Romanticism, which animates leftism in communism and environmentalism.

As an aside, while Nazism is limited to the history books, “Nazism” is with us always. “Nazism” is the accusation that any European who asserts ethnic or cultural self-interest obviously wants to kill millions of Jews. It’s an idiotic Stalinist non-sequitir but the accusation of “Nazism” will lead to social and economic destruction, so do your best to avoid it.

What relevance do Hitler, National Socialism and Nazism have today? Almost none. Some white nationalists use German National Socialism as their model. But German National Socialism was a political movement of its place and time. Hitler was not pro-white, he was pro-German, and he killed huge numbers of white people in his pursuit of German power. Does the Nazi killing of Jews make them especially, uniquely and ultimately evil, as in the current belief? Any political system that relies on killing a huge number of people is evil and defective. However I don’t believe that the killing of a Jew by a German Nazi is more evil or tragic than the killing of a Russian or Ukrainian by a Jewish communist. The Soviet secret police were heavily Jewish- 75% in the Ukraine in 1936, a number not from a hostile source but from a Jewish book on the Holocaust in the Ukraine. The particular economic policies of the NSDAP in Germany in the 30’s are of no more than passing interest today.

The significance of Nazism to both those who hate it and those who want to use it as a model is almost entirely symbolic. Nazism was the one great international challenge to Puritan progressive globalism. For Puritan progressive globalists, that is its great, incredible, unforgivable sin and the reason to tar its opponents with that brush. But for the same reason it has deep appeal to those who find the collar of Puritanism binding, even white, English, Protestant Americans whose fathers or grandfathers fought for it. No one is more obsessed with the Nazis than the English, for the same combination of reasons- awe at those who would challenge them, and a secret hatred of the oppressiveness of their own superiors.

For the modern American National Socialist, just as for the modern American Confederate, a big part of the appeal is the romanticism of a doomed cause. But that hardly helps today.

If there is any lesson to be learned from National Socialism it is the need to look outside the English political outlook for ideas. Few understand how limited the American imagination is by deeply ingrained English ideas, even people who oppose the system. The English class system exists in America in a somewhat attenuated and less obvious way, moreso in the last couple of decades, and people don’t see or understand this.

Sometimes history has important and well-understood lessons, sometimes important lessons that aren’t well-known, and sometimes it’s just stuff that happened. German National Socialism is mostly the second and third.

Advertisements

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

About thrasymachus33308

I like fast cars, fast women and southern-fried rock. I have an ongoing beef with George Orwell. I take my name from a character in Plato's "Republic" who was exasperated with the kind of turgid BS that passed for deep thought and political discourse in that time and place, just as I am today. The character, whose name means "fierce fighter" was based on a real person but nobody knows for sure what his actual political beliefs were. I take my pseudonym from a character in an Adam Sandler song who was a obnoxious jerk who pissed off everybody.

Christ, my minor is in German History, but I have to say I am in awe of this post. It’s pretty much the most cogent thing I’ve ever read on the subject. A few points:

-The Nazis only ‘got the crap kicked out of them’ because Hitler couldn’t keep the non-aggression pact with Russia. If he had, the only European belligerent would have been England, and though they would have fought like dogs (and did, as Hitler knew from experience at Ypres), they would have fallen. The RAF could strafe the Luftwaffe (Hitler didn’t give Goering the time he needed), but eventually Von Braun (who would put us on the moon), would have perfected the V rockets and it would have been closed curtains for London.

-Also, the Nazis were much closer to atomic power than the US up to a certain point, but they saved their knowledge as a bargaining chip to escape Nuremberg prosecution (see: Operation Paperclip). Had they been reassured of German victory, German science would have remained in German hands, and I doubt the sun would be setting on the German Reich in the year of our lord 2013.

-Lastly, it’s important to remember that Hitler was incredibly hostile to real German warriors. He alienated Eric Von Ludendorf, he considered the Freikorps an existential threat. He commissioned the film Kolberg (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z24i-XMmcSk) which denegrates the martial nobility. (Hitler feared monarchical residue, especially in Bavaria where they worshiped Ruprecht). He contemplated killing Ernst Junger (the highest decorated Pour La Merite veteran of the first World War, and author of “Storms of Steel”), and he despised the WW I ace Herman Goering, calling him fat and a coward who killed innocent deer with his bow.

Still, there was much good he did. The best studies linking abestos and cigarette smoke to cancer came from the Nazis. He increased cropland exponentially, built the autobahn at the rate of a kilometer per day, and did in fact form a bulwark against genocidal communist aggression, as well as getting a hold on Wiemar hyperinflation.

As to the role of the Versailles Treaty in giving rise to Hitler, it seems to a double-bind thing. The soft peace (“with malice toward none”) seemed to work for the North during the Civil War, but the “hard peace” of Versailles was in reality a balance between Clemenceau’s demand for punishment, and Lloyd George’s measured response. At the signing of the treaty, Clemenceau remarked that “We have not bought peace, but merely a twenty year armistice.” He was only off by a few months. The loss, not the treaty, I think, was what paved the way for Uncle Adolf.

-Viktor Suvorov wrote a book, which I haven’t read yet, to the effect that Stalin was preparing to attack and Hitler got wind of it and attacked first. I don’t think there was any way the Soviet Union was not going to get involved eventually.

I have read some of Suvorov’s books, including “Icebreaker” — the first and best one on the topic. He’s certainly on solid ground with his claim, even if he’s wrong in some details and even though he’s succumbed to market demand to pump out books one after another. He’s a historical revisionist like Moldbug — using publicly available primary sources where possible to create, or resurrect, different historical interpretations. Being a defector he had no access to Soviet secret archives anyway. By the way, I cannot consider Western academic historians who had such access, especially in Soviet time, to be reliable. They would not have got access for nothing.

The Puritans were not allied with Russia because they were communists, they were allied with Russia because it was their spoiler in Europe.

What about the adulation British intellectuals poured on the Soviet Union before the war that e.g. Orwell described? Fabians etc.? I don’t think you can just ignore this. Puritans certainly loved Russian communists. However, the two considerations are by no means mutually exclusive. In fact, they probably supported each other in XX c. when English establishment had become sufficiently leftist, just as dynastic/monarchical considerations supported geostrategical considerations when both countries were still monarchies.

“No one is more obsessed with the Nazis than the English, for the same combination of reasons- awe at those who would challenge them.”

This also caught my eye, and as a postscript I should mention that Orwell had a deep admiration for Hitler. Most people do, but they’re not honest about it. From rock stars who like the iconography but don’t know the history (like Lemmy of “Motorhead” with his iron cross) or to anyone who has bought a box-set of “History Channel DVDs.” We’re all obsessed, and, as you said “in awe.”

To quote Colin Quinn. Hitler wanted to give us a 10,000 year Reich, but what he really gave us was 10000 hours of programming.

Quinn is proof that entertainment isn’t about supply and demand. “Tough Crowd” (still up on YouTube) had great ratings, but was pulled by the suits because the white guys didn’t have guilt, made jokes about Jews, and said nice things about W from time to time. “Gangsta Rap” is really all you need to know about the supply and demand fallacy re: entertainment. What teenager’s first choice for music would have been a gangbanger with a Jheri Curl selling crack cocaine?

[The old chauvinist Anglophone explanation of World War I was “the Germans started it.” The more recent, nuanced one is “it was a failure of diplomacy.” But English desire to contain Germany has to be seen as a primary cause, possibly the primary cause.]

I don’t know about that. The Germans, Austrians, French, and Russians were powerful and self-willed actors in the drama, not just pawns of the Cathedral/London-Washington, or what have you.

My take from Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” was that the biggest cause of the outbreak of World War One was a hundred years of peace in Europe (while constantly kicking wog butt overseas) had Europeans overestimate the glory and ease of modern technological war, and underestimate its horrors.

(And just as the 1913-1945 war was triggered by too little European fear of war and too great otherizing “the other”, Europe ever since 1945 has been characterized by too much fear of war and too little otherizing the other.)

[The disaster of World War I destroyed much of England’s young male population]

And France’s, and Germany’s

[Nazism was hostile, in rough order, to Jews, Slavs, the British Empire, and any Europeans who opposed German hegemony.]

I would put “communists” full stop somewhere near the top of that list.

Also, I never seen any evidence for the latter two on your list. Hitler admired the British, and wanted no trouble with them. The British Empire and France initiated war with the Nazis, not vice versa. And it seems to me that the Nazis would have made peace with the UK after France fell, if the Brits had been open to it.

The Nazis, throughout the whole war, showed zero compunctions about invading neutral non-belligerent states. But these invasions all seem to me to mostly fall into one of two categories: strategic flanking moves as part of the war the UK and French started (ie Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and Norway), or an element of the Nazis long-stated intention to crush Bolshevikism and to take over and depopulate large swatches of Eastern Europe to assimilate them into a “Greater Deutschland” (Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Baltics).

[German Jews, who were fairly assimilated and probably loyal to Germany]

I dispute this. One of the Nazis biggest and most vocalized beefs was that almost all of the leaders of the violent 1918-19 Communist/Spartacist uprising in Germany that attempted to overthrow the Kaiser and that paralyzed the German war effort were Jewish – Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Kurt Eisner, Philipp Scheidemann, Friedrich Ebert, Leo Jogiches, Clara Zetkin, etc. I see no reason to suppose that these Deutsch ashkenazi, had they succeeded in their revolutionary attempt, would have behaved any differently with the Hohenzollern than Yakov Yurovsky’s team did with the Romanovs (and would have been no easier on the Germans than the Cheka was on the Soviet general populace).

[ They got the living crap beaten out of them.]

Eventually. They did a whole lot of crap beating out of for a while there, though. Man for man, the Germans were the most effective and competent military in the war. Nobody could have held out against the whole world, however (for example, in Italy, in 1944, German troops faced sizable units representing the USA, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, India, Poland, Greecem France, Morocco, Algeria, Brazil, the Italian Co-Belligerent Army, and probably other nations I am not remembering)

[The Nazis only ‘got the crap kicked out of them’ because Hitler couldn’t keep the non-aggression pact with Russia. If he had, the only European belligerent would have been England]

The Nazis didn’t want to fight with England and they did want to fight with Russia. They made both intentions abundantly clear from the start. Keeping the peace with Russia while fighting the Brits to the death would have been like Obama lessening affirmative action – it would have gone against their core animating essence and raison d’etre.

Um. How about the 1848 revolutionary wars, the Crimean War, the German Unification wars, the Austro-Prussian war, the Italian Risorgimento wars, the Franco-Prussian war, the Balkan wars, to say nothing of numerous and bloodycolonialconflicts which cannot very well be described as “kicking wog butt”? Other than this, you seem to be more at home at Stormfront, the way you paint Germany as nice and fluffy and peace-loving. Regarding German Jews, most of them were indeed assimilated, like Rathenau (no lesser man than Einstein, who supported Zionists, had chided them for their “assimilationist strivings”), and I’d guess that some of the communism of their youth was adolescent rebellion (sound familiar?) Of course it made no difference whatsoever later.

As an aside about “crushing the Bolshevikism” in Ukraine, after WWI Germans threw Petlura’s government, which was eager to cooperate, under the bus because they considered them garbage, inferior Slavs. Then Bolsheviks took over. Same thing happened in WWII with both Ukrainians (Bandera) and Russians (Vlasov): they would have fought with Germany against the Soviets, but Nazis considered them untermenschen and screwed them over.

All those wars being as they were, none of them were large or severe enough to have the European powers realize that by 1913 the days of brightly colored uniforms, cavalry charges, battlefields far from the cities, and battle casualties in the thousands were over, and the age of machine guns, barbed wire, gas shells, mass bombardment, submarines, airplanes, total civilizational war, and battle casualties by the millions was upon them.

[the way you paint Germany as nice and fluffy and peace-loving]

If trying “to take over and depopulate large swatches of Eastern Europe” equals “nice and fluffy and peace-loving” in your world, then you’re more genocide loving than I am.

[Regarding German Jews, most of them were indeed assimilated]

Most German Jews in 1919 (or 1930) may indeed have been assimilated. It also appears however that most of those Germans attempting to lead a communist revolution were Jewish.

(kind of like modern America – most Muslims may not want to plant bombs, but a majority of people trying to plant bombs are Muslims)

[the communism of their youth was adolescent rebellion (sound familiar?) Of course it made no difference whatsoever later.]

Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were both forty seven when they lead the Spartakusaufstand in 1919. Also, their attempted revolution ended up making no difference because Freikorps and other rightist/traditionalist street fighters crushed it. Had they and the other Jewish communists somehow succeeded, it would have indeed made a difference – one can look at Russia 1917-1991 for the template.

[but Nazis considered them untermenschen and screwed them over.]

Yes. “Slavs” were second on thrasymachus’ list of those groups that the Nazis a priori were hostile to.

I agree about the quality of those wars. RS mentions the US Civil war below, but it was too far away for Europe to take much notice. I objected to your ‘hundred years’ peace’ statement. However, Russia was humiliated by Britain and France in Crimea (and later, outrageously, by Japan) and France was humiliated by Prussia.

The British Empire and France initiated war with the Nazis, not vice versa.

This is partly why I said you’re painting Germany nice and fluffy. First, hadn’t Hitler known that Poland has a mutual defence treaty with France and Britain? Sure he did. He was just expecting them to ignore their promises and acquiesce in the dismemberment of Poland like they did with Czechoslovakia. Second, in exactly the same spirit I can say that Japan initiated the war against the United States and the Nazis initiated war against the Soviet Union. You know, they just suddenly and treacherously attacked our peaceful homeland! artillery fire and bombs just fell out of the blue! Pfui.

And it seems to me that the Nazis would have made peace with the UK after France fell, if the Brits had been open to it.

This is another part. Britain’s geostrategical considerations are no secret and hadn’t changed since the XVI century (they are submerged now because all Western Europe is aligned with the US). Queen Elizabeth said that “the day of the destruction of France would also be the eve of the destruction of England”. Britain cannot hope to stand against the whole Continent, so she has to defend France at a pinch. By extension, she must prevent the formation of a Continental hegemon capable of destroying France. The alternative is to accept second-tier, semi-dependent status. Maybe Britain is ready for it now.

some of the communism of their youth was adolescent rebellion (sound familiar?) Of course it made no difference whatsoever later.

Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were both forty seven when they lead the Spartakusaufstand in 1919.

I wrote about some of the the communism of their youth. Youth does not include people pushing fifty. Revolutionary aurochs like Liebknecht and Luxemburg are a separate category. Obviously such people existed, but the Jewish youth was eager to help — certainly this was the case in Russia.

Again, you are correct that the European nations were indeed involved in wars in the century between Waterloo and the Marne, some of them significant or consequential. But, again, it sounds like we are in agreement than none of those wars were impactful enough to give the Europeans a realistic sense of what they were getting into in 1914.

It was eye-opening for me to recently realize that the act that actually “started WW2” was Britain and France declaring war on Germany for the act of taking back land that had, for the most part, been part of Prussia for centuries before being punitively confiscated by the Treaty of Versailles. However, as you say, the defense guarantee was common knowledge, so, one would imagine that Hitler and the Nazis knew that they were, for all practical purposes, declaring/inviting war with the UK and France by attacking Poland. But the top Nazis were also showed themselves to be consistently delusional, so who knows how clearly they were thinking.

Britain may indeed have considered it crucial to fight on in 1940 so as to try to prevent a monolithic continental hegemon. But, absent the USSR and/or USA joining the battle, I’d say that they had no hope of victory against Germany and Italy. And, even as it did turn out, victory ended up costing the Brits the remains of their commonwealth/empire, their solvency, and hundreds of thousands of young men. So I am not sure what was really accomplished for them in the end.

I have not read Patrick Buchanan’s “Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World”, but I believe that his thesis is that the Western democracies would have been best served by sitting it out and letting the Nazis and Soviets go at ot. I am inclined to agree.

If I understand you correctly, you seem to be saying that older Russian, German, and otherwise European Jews were generally assimulated, orderly, and patriotic, while the hotheads, revolutionaries, and radicals were generally more younger folks. That may be – I have no knowledge on the matter.

Serbian Intelligence (through the Black Hand terrorists) was behind the assassination of the Archduke and his wife. Serbs refused to even agree to a joint investigation with Austria since they knew they were guilty. The Anglophile cunts think the Austrians should have let the whole thing slide.

… Serbia started behaving very badly – by Vattel’s standards. There is no doubt that the Serbian cabinet was an accessory before the fact to Sarajevo. (Try Sidney Fay’s Origins of the World War.) In Vattel’s world, Austria had every right to invade Serbia, and it was none of anyone’s business. Certainly not Britain’s!

In Benjamin Franklin Trueblood’s world, of course, it was incumbent on Austria to make peace before making war. I can’t help noticing that Benjamin Franklin Trueblood’s world, now that we have it and all, (a) doesn’t have a whole lot of peace, and (b) does have a whole lot of terrorists. Perhaps this is not a coincidence.

The general behavior of Britain and the Entente before the First German War was to provoke Germany in every way possible, but to make the result appear as if Germany was itself acting unstably and aggressively. The unsurpassed chronicle of this story, for its brilliant writing as well as its early date, is Francis Neilson’s How Diplomats Make War (1915). I will not excerpt this. Read the whole thing. It is timeless.”

…I also agree with English historian Niall Ferguson that the English, and particularly the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, did more to bring on the war than one is generally taught in the Anglo-American world. Churchill and other English military-political leaders in 1914 were long itching for a showdown with their German rival and were deploying the British fleet against Germany quite belligerently weeks before the war broke out.

Moreover, the English were in a position to stay out of the struggle without damaging their financial and naval power; while given its resources, wealth, and population, the United States would have emerged by the end of a European war as the strongest commercial and industrial nation, no matter which side won. The Anglo-American world would not have suffered by sitting out a continental war in 1914; and an Austro-German victory would have been something far less disastrous, contrary to what neocons and other Teutonophobes insist, than would have been a Nazi conquest of Europe in 1940. Needless to say, the second would not have been possible without the Allied victory and Allied peace achieved in 1918-19.

Taki is correct about the merits of the Austro-German world in 1914, which was highly civilized, politically far less centralized than the current version of “democracy,” and in the case of the Austrian part of the Habsburg Empire, a model of bourgeois liberal economic policies. During the struggle, the German and Austrian empires allowed far more open criticism of the war than Wilson’s new democratic order. Those who protested the war in Germany sat unmolested in the Reichstag; in France and the US they were jailed and often the targets of government-incited violence.

No one is denying that there was a militaristic legacy in the German Empire and that the military, owing to the collapse of civilian government, had assumed too much control of the German state by 1916. On the other hand, it is not Wilhelmine Germany but the Third Reich that prefigured the global imperialist rhetoric that fills the editorial pages of the Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal, and other supposed advocates of American constitutional government. Not even Kaiser Wilhelm, in his most self-indulgent fantasies about “Germany’s place in the sun,” sounded quite as whacked-out as the “new American nationalists” who have now captured the American Right. One could only imagine how American global democrats would react if their megalomania and self-righteousness were expressed by someone in a Prussian uniform.

What is being argued is not that an Austro-German victory in 1914 would have been the most desirable historical course. Rather, it would have been preferable to what did happen in 1918, the destruction of the imperial governments of Germany and Austria, a vindictive Allied peace, and the subsequent unleashing of totalitarian governments in Europe. This is not even to speak of the parlous state of civil liberties and the eruption of managerial tyranny in Wilsonian America, a condition thoroughly described by Murray Rothbard, Arthur Ekirch, Ralph Raico, and Robert Higgs.

Serbian Intelligence (through the Black Hand terrorists) was behind the assassination of the Archduke and his wife. Serbs refused to even agree to a joint investigation with Austria since they knew they were guilty. The Anglophile cunts think the Austrians should have let the whole thing slide.

… Serbia started behaving very badly – by Vattel’s standards. There is no doubt that the Serbian cabinet was an accessory before the fact to Sarajevo. (Try Sidney Fay’s Origins of the World War.) In Vattel’s world, Austria had every right to invade Serbia, and it was none of anyone’s business. Certainly not Britain’s!

In Benjamin Franklin Trueblood’s world, of course, it was incumbent on Austria to make peace before making war. I can’t help noticing that Benjamin Franklin Trueblood’s world, now that we have it and all, (a) doesn’t have a whole lot of peace, and (b) does have a whole lot of terrorists. Perhaps this is not a coincidence.

The general behavior of Britain and the Entente before the First German War was to provoke Germany in every way possible, but to make the result appear as if Germany was itself acting unstably and aggressively. The unsurpassed chronicle of this story, for its brilliant writing as well as its early date, is Francis Neilson’s How Diplomats Make War (1915). I will not excerpt this. Read the whole thing. It is timeless.”

…I also agree with English historian Niall Ferguson that the English, and particularly the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, did more to bring on the war than one is generally taught in the Anglo-American world. Churchill and other English military-political leaders in 1914 were long itching for a showdown with their German rival and were deploying the British fleet against Germany quite belligerently weeks before the war broke out.

Moreover, the English were in a position to stay out of the struggle without damaging their financial and naval power; while given its resources, wealth, and population, the United States would have emerged by the end of a European war as the strongest commercial and industrial nation, no matter which side won. The Anglo-American world would not have suffered by sitting out a continental war in 1914; and an Austro-German victory would have been something far less disastrous, contrary to what neocons and other Teutonophobes insist, than would have been a Nazi conquest of Europe in 1940. Needless to say, the second would not have been possible without the Allied victory and Allied peace achieved in 1918-19.

Taki is correct about the merits of the Austro-German world in 1914, which was highly civilized, politically far less centralized than the current version of “democracy,” and in the case of the Austrian part of the Habsburg Empire, a model of bourgeois liberal economic policies. During the struggle, the German and Austrian empires allowed far more open criticism of the war than Wilson’s new democratic order. Those who protested the war in Germany sat unmolested in the Reichstag; in France and the US they were jailed and often the targets of government-incited violence.

No one is denying that there was a militaristic legacy in the German Empire and that the military, owing to the collapse of civilian government, had assumed too much control of the German state by 1916. On the other hand, it is not Wilhelmine Germany but the Third Reich that prefigured the global imperialist rhetoric that fills the editorial pages of the Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal, and other supposed advocates of American constitutional government. Not even Kaiser Wilhelm, in his most self-indulgent fantasies about “Germany’s place in the sun,” sounded quite as whacked-out as the “new American nationalists” who have now captured the American Right. One could only imagine how American global democrats would react if their megalomania and self-righteousness were expressed by someone in a Prussian uniform.

What is being argued is not that an Austro-German victory in 1914 would have been the most desirable historical course. Rather, it would have been preferable to what did happen in 1918, the destruction of the imperial governments of Germany and Austria, a vindictive Allied peace, and the subsequent unleashing of totalitarian governments in Europe. This is not even to speak of the parlous state of civil liberties and the eruption of managerial tyranny in Wilsonian America, a condition thoroughly described by Murray Rothbard, Arthur Ekirch, Ralph Raico, and Robert Higgs.

> distinction between German Jews, who were fairly assimilated and probably loyal to Germany, and Eastern European Jews, who were quite hostile.

German Jews were undoubtedly more assimilated, but according to Ernst Nolte — who was there, though only ten at the time of the ’33 revolution — a lot of them were revolutionary-left activists, and a lot of rev-left activists were them. Of course they were only 1% of Germans, so they could hardly have been the majority of the rev-left. But I could well imagine they were on the order of half of the rev-left leaders, as they were ~1/3 (or whatever) of the doctors, lawyers.

> The British Empire, which should probably include the US for practical purposes, had been containing or fighting Germany since its modern inception.

More like vice versa. England was already cognizant of its declining power, and mulling over strategic retrenchment, decades before ’39 — for one thing, she underwent a fecundity decline well before Germany did, and that was one major source of anxiety. While it was Eisenhower’s White House that made US hegemony ‘official’ in the Suez crisis some years after WWII, England felt weaker than US long ago.

And they probably contemplated it a fair amount in the interwar, during which US planners considered England a potential enemy. I don’t think the US planners felt much antipathy for England, they were just conscious of its position as #2 in potential long-distance force projection, and perhaps #1 in actual, at-the-ready long-distance force projection capacity.

Churchill’s approximate words to FDR, found in Tooze’s Wages of destruction, were, ‘so when we run out of money and/or credit, you will keep sending us the stuff just the same?’ Meaning of course everything from bullets to airplanes.

I’ve also heard claims recently that the US installed most of the heavy industrial capacity in USSR in the 30s, partly in exchange for (largely looted) value and apparently partly out of charity/alliance/’conspiracy’. This must almost certainly have pissed off most of Atlantic Europe, since, at least at the time of the Russian Civil War, they had wanted to invade on the Tsarist side but couldn’t afford to, already being up to their ears in debt to US, which opposed this invasion.

> The idea of eliminating the feeble could only have come from Puritan progressivism, which was highly eugenic.

Why did it have to come from anywhere, or why did it have to have some other staging area in which to gain influence, and/or, why do Germans necessarily have to always have the same feelings, over time, about dudes who are missing a hand? New ideas occur to people often, and populations can change their ideas without heavy exogenous influence. –Not that I deny that cultures have any momentum or inertia whatsoever ; hardly.

> Nazism was simply a product of a certain time, place and culture. Was it the unique and ultimate evil of human existence? I will blaspheme here by saying no.

I will also say no, and also emphasize as I have previously done, that the horrors in Russian-Jewish USSR happened first chronologically. The salience of this should be pretty obvious. From what little I know, I’m not a scholar of the subject, the German horrors may have been somewhat worse. They also happened second, taking their origin in a period when Germans were not only humiliated (the past), but also threatened (the future). Mainstream history rather emphasizes the former, not the latter.

Of course, in fairness to Jews, you can also go centuries back into history for more mega scale Euro-Jewish conflict, whose root is the higher biological fitness of Jews and the definite threat presented by this to European life. (There were also more minor scale, though non-negligible atrocities against Jews that were not already multiple centuries old in 1917.)

You can find examples of Jewish perfidy throughout history, but it is still a mistake to think in terms of global Jewry. Why?

Let’s look at World War 2. After Trotsky got the icepick, the Jews loyal to Trotsky were subjected to the “show trials” wherein Stalin was going to get rid of the heavily-Jewish ranks of communists loyal to Bronstein/ Trotsky. The U.S. Ambassador Davies wrote a book “Mission to Moscow” wherein he sanitized these trials, and like Lillian Hellman or Walter Duranty of the New York Times, he did his best to be a “useful idiot” for “Uncle Joe” Stalin. (These gentiles, contrary to what Thrasymachus says, did love communism).

As for American Jews, the most powerful ones at least, like Mayer, Thalberg, and Selznick, didn’t do anything to help the Jewish communists in Russia to escape the purge. On the contrary, they adapted Davies’ hogwash for the screen, as well as “The North Star” (by Lewis Milestone) and did everything in their power to cover up the sham nature of the kangaroo courts. There was still an entrenched WASP elite in America at that time (even in the film colony) and the Jews were more interested in toadying up to that than they were in forming some kind of alliance with Russian Jews.

This is where Moldbug is right and Macdonald is wrong. If American Jews can do something to advance Jewish interest, they will. But if it’s a choice between pure economic interest and helping out the Shtetl types back home, they are going to “nimmt die Geld, bubby.”

That is extremely fascinating history, but they could easily have more global solidarity now than they had at one time. One reason for such a change would be general globalization, and another would be that their power has advanced so much that there is not really another serious power-center in the West for them to toady up to anymore. At the same time, their distinctness from Europids is blurring fast enough that their war on Europids is already well past bizarro, so here we are, born into bizarro land. But being a bit odd, conflicted, and compulsive myself, I actually don’t find them or this era as confusing as I might.

Robert Conquest estimates that the Great Purge killed approx. two million-only a small percentage of the murdered were Jews. There was nothing specifically anti-Jewish about the purge.-Stalin only became paranoid about the Jews about 1948.

The Puritans were not allied with Russia because they were communists, they were allied with Russia because it was their spoiler in Europe.

The two considerations are by no means mutually exclusive. In fact, these two considerations probably cooperated in XX c. when English establishment had become sufficiently leftist, just as dynastic/monarchical considerations cooperated with geostrategical considerations when both countries were still monarchies.

What do you mean supported? Like coincided with, augmented, synergized with?

NS success was mostly a reaction to the KPD and the Soviet threat. Violent militants beget violent militants who oppose them. The Versailles Diktat and the Weimar Republic were widely unpopular well beyond the circles of the NSDAP.

Bloody, but took place a damn long way from all the powerful capitals.

> the German Unification wars

Not really familiar

> the Austro-Prussian war, the Franco-Prussian war,

Ended respectively in like one day(?) and three weeks(?). Compare w/ Napoleon.

> the Balkan wars, the Italian Risorgimento wars,

Respectively not a power, and a non-power. Therefore, not categorically uninfluential, but less influential.

What you’re saying cuts into Ian’s / his source’s point, but doesn’t blow it away. To hear you tell it there was never any belle epoque. You might have mentioned the US Civil War, which probably was or could well have been more relevant than some of those, in terms of influencing the minds of attentive and semi-attentive Muscovite, Parisian, London, Viennese, and German elites. It and the Crimean seem like the most relevant to me. But then, they lay fairly deep in the past at that point, themselves.

And the US Civil War took place in a land of unending ‘strategic depth’ (geographic depth) per capita. A European might have thought, no wonder they couldn’t bring a war to a nice decisive head, what with all that space per person.

Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People

Winston Churchill

Some people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.

And it may well be that this same astounding race may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible. It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical.

Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism.

Zionism has already become a factor in the political convulsions of Russia, as a powerful competing influence in Bolshevik circles with the international communistic system. Nothing could be more significant than the fury with which Trotsky has attacked the Zionists generally, and Dr. Weissmann in particular. The cruel penetration of his mind leaves him in no doubt that his schemes of a world-wide communistic State under Jewish domination are directly thwarted and hindered by this new ideal, which directs the energies and the hopes of Jews in every land towards a simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal. The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.

“any kind of assertion of ethnic self-interest or nationalism by non-Jews”
The funny part is that it is not true anymore, Jewish Nationalism aka Zionism is the most hated ideology by today’s left everywhere, and any kind of assertion of ethnic self-interest or nationalism by Jews in Israel is also ruthlessly suppressed.
Learn about Kahanism, the attitude towards “Settlers” (Nationalist-religious Jews), and the situation of the Orthodox in Israel.

Lots of people hate Zionism but it doesn’t seem to have any practical effect. Israel continues to do what it believes it needs to do, and the only limitation on this is the consensus of Jews. More liberal Jewish opinon outside Israel restricts Israeli action, but nothing else really does.

Again, I’m no scholar, just a guy who reads stuff and comes up with his own crazy ideas. The best illustration of this is “Faust”, by Goethe, parts I and II. Part I is the one people know, where Faust sells his soul to the devil and bad things happen. Part II is something entirely different, and I can’t think why Goethe didn’t just create another character for it except he wanted to make a reversal on the traditional morality play of Part I. In Part II Faust wakes up and has been forgiven all the things he did in Part I- because he was striving, and all should be forgiven an man who strives. I think Goethe was at the cusp of Romanticism and wanted to show traditional morality being wiped away by the Promethean power of science.

Things like Nietzsche, which I had read long before, made much more sense to me after I read this.

The thing with the Soviets is that everybody says they were worse than the Nazis. The Ukrainian “Holocaust” wasn’t really a Holocaust considering that year had a successful harvest. Plus, according to the NKVD’s own stats, they weren’t made up of Jews. Zionism was looked down upon in Soviet Russia. So I’m skeptical of the “all Soviets were Jews” thing, especially since after Trotsky, the NKVD wanted to purge any acquaintance with them. Not that I hate this blog, but some things are a little out of the ball park.

Hey, the 75% number cam from a Jewish holocaust book. Ireland had successful harvests of everything but potatoes during the famine, but the wheat was shipped away. The Ukrainian as well as Chinese famines are attributable not so much to bad harvests as much as the government taking all the food that was produced for people they like better.

I don’t claim to know exactly what the deal was, but everybody who has official credibility is suspect. People dismissed as crazy are always wrong. There’s not much sober, objective analysis of these things.